Occasionally someone will ask where I get ideas for my columns. Well, sometimes the news just parodies itself. For today’s topic, I had to look no further than a story in last week’s issue of the “Bison.” You may have read about the Parisian engineer Pascal Cotte, who is using digital technology to unlock the mysteries of Leonardo da Vinci’s legendary “Mona Lisa.” After scrutinizing the painting for more than 3,000 hours with state-of-the-art, high-resolution imaging capability, Cotte has announced that, in the 500 years since it was done, the painting’s colors have most certainly faded.
Inspired by this revelation, I went into my closet and found a shirt that I bought in 1989. After subjecting the shirt to 17 hours of infra-red scanning and heat-sensitive tests, I was shocked to learn that its colors, too, are not as bright as they once were. Here I have been walking around town in this thing, and no one has said a word about it. I guess that’s an awkward subject to bring up. Which explains why I never told my good friend (and Harding graduate) Richard Anderson that his Wile E. Coyote T-shirt was looking really, really bad after 10 years.
But I digress. This revolutionary approach is sending shock waves through the art world. In 2003, engineers at the Art Institute of Chicago received a $25 million grant to submit Picasso paintings to intensive cyber-scrutiny. After more than four years of meticulous calculations, they determined — much to the embarrassment of Picasso scholars everywhere — that the proportions in his faces are way, way off. According to a prominent forensic biologist speaking on terms of anonymity, careful analysis proves that a person cannot, under any known principles of anatomy, have eyes in her cheeks.
And that’s just the beginning. Researchers in Pisa, Italy have been reexamining the famous tower there, and digital photographs taken from space have revealed that the 18th century structure may, in fact, be leaning. Local residents were stunned. “I had no idea,” said Luigi Giordano, 59. “I’ve lived here for 45 years, and whenever I looked at the tower, I always assumed there was something wrong with my contact lenses.”
Archaeology has been turned on its head, too. Shifting from a 20-year career of excavation and recovery to an all-digital approach, Dr. Illinois Smith has begun using sonic wave imaging to go deeper into the substrata of ancient ruins than ever before. While the formal announcement of his findings will not be published for another year, Dr. Smith sent an email scoop to three select journalists. And I quote, “We can now establish with absolute certainty that Rome was not — I repeat, was not — built in one day.”
The implications of this new technology reach far beyond the visual arts. After nearly 35 weeks of tests, high-frequency resonance imaging has proven that Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” was originally intended to be played up tempo. That was news to Dr. Hugo von Quietrach, director of the famed Whispering Willow All-Pianissimo Orchestra in Berlin. “We may have to reconsider our approach to that piece,” he said, softly.
A professor once wrote on one of my lit papers that I had an “astonishing grasp of the obvious.” At the time I was disheartened by that critique, but now I realize that there is a fortune in grant money to be made for anyone with the uncanny ability to see what everyone else can see. If a sociologist can get millions of dollars in funding to demonstrate conclusively that men do not care to stand too close to each other in public restrooms, surely there is money out there for me to shake literary studies to the core with my theory that Sam-I-Am was — wait for it — a major underground pusher of green eggs and ham.
Dr. Claxton is on sabbatical this semester. This column originally appeared on November 2, 2007.
